The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many distilleries to switch focus and start producing hand sanitiser to cater to the huge need and lack of supply in Australia.
One of these distilleries was Melbourne based Gospel Distillers, who in March announced they would be donating all profits from their hand sanitiser production to charity in order to help the hospitality community.
From the start, Gospel Distillers have been incredibly transparent about their intentions with the sanitiser, even showing an exact breakdown of production costs to profit amounts to customers. From each 100ml bottle priced at $6, there would be $3.40 of profit and 100 per cent of these profits would go to their charity effort.
Such profits only come from their publicly retailed sanitiser, not the product they’ve been making at production cost directly for frontline medical organisations.
At the time the sanitiser went on sale, The Gospel Distillers Co-founder Andrew Fitzgerald said: “Just to be clear, we will cover the cost of our staff and the raw materials only, donating everything that is left over to charity. We challenge anyone else with this capability to do the same. The last thing we want to do in such a time of need, with a product that people are desperate to get, is make a profit.”
Now, with all 2600 publicly available whiskey wash sanitiser units sold and over $8500 raised, they have revealed The Gospel Goodwill Program, initiated to distribute the funds into the Victorian hospitality community.
In describing the program, they have said: “The Gospel Goodwill Program is a lottery system to evenly divide up the funds between 50 selected hospitality staff in need, equating to $176.80 per recipient. Each application will be reviewed with the qualified applications being entered into the final selection process from which the 50 recipients will be decided randomly.”
“To ensure transparency The Gospel has enlisted Keep Our Venues Alive’s Melbourne representative Fred Siggins to judicate this process.”
The Gospel Distillers said this type of registered charity did not already exist in Australia and so the team, wanting to help those who are struggling, decided to make their own solution. They said: “Though we wish we could give more money to more people, we hope this small boost makes a difference and encourages others to do the same.”
Applications for the Gospel Goodwill Program are open now and close this Friday 16 April at midnight. At this time, they are only accepting applications from Victorian based hospitality workers.
Follow the link at http://thegospelwhiskey.com/ to apply.
